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Corona documentary: Researchers believe the pandemic could have been prevented

Corona documentary: Researchers believe the pandemic could have been prevented

The corona pandemic cost millions of lives and changed the world. Was this development really inevitable? A new documentation meticulously reconstructs the first weeks of Corona – it paints a disastrous picture.

At first it was just rumours. Rumors of an ominous new disease. It was about a city in China, a fish market. Didn’t know much more. Then came the pandemic. Michael Welch is responsible for the documentary “The Outbreak – Was the Pandemic Avoidable?” went on a journey through time, back to the early days of the corona pandemic. To do this, he has traveled the world, speaking to leading researchers and doctors, to people working behind the scenes and to those on the front lines fighting death. His research focuses on one question: Could the pandemic have been prevented, could the lives of millions have been saved?

The calendar wrote March 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) shared the breaking news on Twitter. Covid-19, the breaking news read, can be described as a pandemic. But how urgent was the authority really in educating the public about the dangers of Covid-19? In fact, it was breaking news sent by snail mail. After all, ten weeks had passed since the disease was discovered – January, February, March. Leading experts say today that ten weeks were decisive for the course of the pandemic. They said so then too. But why did it take so long for the alarm to go off? Welch’s film highlights key moments in those first few weeks. He deals with authorities that withheld information, with misjudgments and delays, with ignorance, small talk and nice talk. And the stories are told by people who experienced and helped shape these weeks up close.

Corona pandemic: “People fell like leaves from the trees”

People like doctor Li Wenliang from Wuhan. Who already reported in December 2019 in a chat with colleagues about his concerns about the new virus. To the injustice of the Chinese authorities, who, as the documentation shows, gave him a police warning and, as a result, demonstrably silenced him under threat of punishment. Wenliang later died of a corona infection.

From people like Olfert Landt, managing director of a Berlin laboratory that produced test kits for Covid-19 early on. Landt reports that the demand for the kits was so great back in February that he knew something was on the way. And who, when he happened to meet the then Minister of Health Jens Spahn in the opera at the time, spoke directly to him about the danger of the virus. However, according to Landt, the minister assessed the situation very differently.

Or the story of Nadia Vallati. She was in Bergamo for the Italian Red Cross when the virus was raging there. Vallati, who is still fighting back tears months later when she talks about the many, many emergency calls and the impossibility of getting everywhere on time. “The people,” she says, “fell like leaves from the trees.” The images of the truck columns on which the coffins with Corona dead from Bergamo were stacked went around the world.

This all happened before the WHO breaking news.

Meticulous reconstruction

Welch’s documentary is a meticulous reconstruction of the early weeks of the pandemic. The film questions the decision-making processes of the WHO, health authorities worldwide and politics. Follows investigative journalists at work in Beijing and looks inside confidential footage that shows how Chinese authorities have kept the world in the dark for weeks, squandering ways to contain the novel coronavirus. And the documentation also provides answers to the question of whether the pandemic could have been prevented. But see for yourself.

Michael Welch’s documentary “The Outbreak – Was the Pandemic Preventable?” runs on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, from 8:15 p.m. on ZDF. It can be accessed in the ZDFmediathek from 10 a.m. the day before.

Source: Stern

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